CD Projekt Red’s (CDPR) next project, The Witcher IV, was finally revealed with its first official trailer at this year’s Game Awards event. The reveal trailer marks the studio’s return to The Continent, nearly a decade after the franchise’s third instalment.
There are a couple of points to take in from the trailer alone. Firstly, the game marks the departure of Geralt of Rivia as the main protagonist; the role has now shifted to his adopted daughter, Ciri. Like Geralt and any other Witcher, Ciri can be seen carrying two swords, one being Zirael and the other, presumably, a silver sword.
The trailer starts off in the typical Witcher fashion: Ciri has been employed to hunt down a monster by a desperate father, who has been forced into sending his only daughter out into what is clearly a haunted or, in this case, monster-infested woods. The trailer goes on to show Ciri heading into the woods to save the girl, dispatching the monster in typical Witcher fashion – drinking potions, using signs – albeit with her own twist and access to different powers, given her lineage. Sadly, her efforts seem to have been for nothing as she emerges from the woods only to find that the girl had been stabbed to death by the very villagers who had condemned her.
The end of the trailer shows Ciri echoing what Geralt had said at the end of the first Witcher 3 trailer: there are no men, only monsters. And killing monsters is the business of the Witcher.
The other point to take note of is plastered right at the beginning of the trailer: the entire in-game video was rendered using an “unannounced” NVIDIA GeForce RTX GPU. That is a clear and obvious reference to the GPU brand’s next-generation GeForce RTX 50 Series, which is expected to launch next month, during CES 2025.
(Source: The Witcher via YouTube)
